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Waterfireearth

Posted 03 October 2012 - 01:37 PM

It can turn SATA hard drives on and off.
My setup will have a SSD as the primary drive with the OS installed on it and some apps.
The secondary drive will be a normal hard drive. On this secondary hard drive I will install the rest of my applications.
I have various other drives that I will turn on and off including a optical drive to prolong the life of the parts and to save electricity.

My question is can I turn off the secondary drive when not in use and then turn it on at anytime (hot swap)? Or will this somehow corrupt data on the SSD and or the secondary drive, as I assume the files from the primary hard drive are interlinked with the files no the secondary drive.
Again I will stress that the primary SSD will have the entire OS and other applications installed on it.

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Waterfireearth

Posted 05 October 2012 - 10:48 PM

A reply would be much appreciated. I have finished the build and left one extra SATA power cable from the Lian Li for the secondary drive if I can safely hot swap it.
However I have a problem.

The board I am using is a GA-Z77X-D3H. It supports hot swapping. I installed Windows 7 64bit and had all drive controllers set to ACHI. However I did not realise that there is a Hot Swap option in the BIOS - coming from a 965P motherboard which simply required the drive to be set to ACHI and hot swap worked automatically I expected the same here. It did not work.

So I decided to investigate. Turns out the board has a option in the BIOS for all drives connected to the Z77 controller for hot swap to be turned on or off. So I enabled it for my drives. But no joy. Nothing comes up in the safely remove hardware. Tried rebooting to see if that would fix it. Still the same issue. Was the hot swap option meant to be set before installing the OS which is on the SSD which is not being set to hot swap for obvious reasons....?